Information

This video is part of the DDR Project 4, a full hour non stop music video. The fadings at the beginning and at the end (where the video was mixed with the previous and the next) are both intended.

*** Video Comments ***

This is our contribution to the 4th (and last) year of the DDR project... being on these projects was a lot of fun, and we want to thank Patrick, Hsien and Brad for giving us the possibility of partecipating.

As every year, this video has its own peculiar story. Long ago, when we were still wondering about the 5th mix, we happened to listen to Petit Love and we immediately commented "I feel sorry for the poor bastard who'll end up with this song".

Time later, at track selection time, Cristina tells me "I have our first pick". Having the 5th mix a zillion of good songs, I was utterly shocked when I saw Petit Love right there, in pole position in our list! Cristina's idea was so good though that it changed my mind completely... I wanted to be the bastard doing this track! :p

Later, after we got our track assigned, it turned out that Petit Love was one of the most popular picks in the whole selection for the 4th project... that put a bit of panic on us, since we were almost sure to have picked something that nobody wanted: the pressure of expectation started to build up ^^;

The Idea behind the video

So, what was this incredibly good idea that made us change our mind about this song? Well, the song talks about this girl who explains to this guy how to make her fall in love with him... so, basically, it called for an easy romance-type of video.

Cristina's idea was to build the fun factor by showing a relationship that is exactly the opposite than the one which is sung, where the girl goes crazy for the guy and he doesn't want anything to do with her. Which anime could be better than Fruits Basket, with the explosive relationship between Kagura and Kyo? :p

So, when the song goes "If you want to capture me..." we see Kagura ferociously chasing Kyo, "We are going to have a good time..." as she tears Kyo's shirt, "I love you" and she punches him in the face... well, you get the idea of what kind of contrast we tried to create :p

Editing

As far as scene selection went, editing was relatively easy because of the very solid idea that we had in mind. The greatest difficulty of all was the scarcity of clips that we ended up working with: Kagura appears consistently in only 3 or 4 episodes (and never in a whole episode), which left us with very limited material to use.

This is mostly the source of what I consider the weakest part of the whole video: close to the end, with all the static images coming in on each "My love": this was a very strong point in the song which called for powerful imagery... the only problem was that we were out of any possible clip ^^; Moreover we were also 3 days past the official deadline, and menacing emails were starting to arrive from Hsien... so we decided just to leave it as it was (which actually is not bad, it's just that it could have been done better :p).

Digital Effects

While simple editing (read, slamming the clips on the timeline and roughly timing them) took just 3 days for the whole song, we maturated an idea for the final composing that later took us to the gates of hell "Why don't we make the whole video as a big, animated, comic?". From any perspective, it looked a fresh and original idea: we made a little proof of concept and liked it, so we decided to go for it.

Technically, it translated to:

1) Export the small cuts one by one from Premiere
2) Draw the big page in PhotoShop
3) Import everything into AE
4) Compose the big page
5) Animate the page in the final composition

All of the above for all the pages of the video. I am not 100% positive, but I think we are close enough to say that there is not one original frame from the show in this video: everything has been edited in some sort of way before the final render :p

If that was not enough, we had more ideas while we were proceeding with the editing. We though it would have been cool to make characters pop up and sing a couple of lines (mostly choruses), and we wanted also to use the announcer's voice (who ended up being played by Ayame, who took also the part of John Lennon... brrrr.... :p). This meant a lot of manual rotoscoping of the characters in PhotoShop, to extract them and place them in the video.

We also discussed the idea of incorporating ballons in the video, which could have added an extra layer of fun and made it look even more like a comic, but eventually we decided against the idea (mostly because we were out of time, and also we didn't have any really funny idea for them ^^).

I'll spare you of all the technical hell we went through to make things look right, color correction, clip cleaning, fine tuning, etc, and the fighting hell on how to edit, how to time, which beat to follow, which clip to select, etc, because it's not fun and you probably don't want to hear it anyway :p

The Overall Experience

We enjoyed working on this video. A lot. Even though it still looks like that people enjoy more our Azumanga video, we feel that (with all the problems we had) this is really the best and more advanced video we produced for the DDR Projects.

It was a hell of fun being in the DDR and a hell of fun (yeah, even with all the fights and stuff :p) creating this video. We sincerely love it, and we hope you'll like it too ^_^